Why Are You Kinking The Hose?

Stephanie is in New Orleans with her mom and sister when her phone buzzes: her short film has just been accepted into the Berlin Sci-Fi Film Festival. She tells them immediately. They celebrate. It's a genuinely great moment.

And then, 24 hours later, she's talking herself out of going.

This is the story of what happens when you get exactly what you asked for — and immediately try to kink the hose. Featuring a very direct coach, a booked flight she had no idea how to afford, and the moment she remembered that saying yes is how things actually start.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:40 New Orleans, Last Night
• 01:01 The Notification
• 01:32 24 Hours Later
• 02:23 Why Are You Kinking the Hose?
• 04:22 She Books the Flight
• 04:47 What Happens When You Say Yes
• 06:40 Berlin
• 07:36 The Bigger Leaps
• 08:06 Until Next Time

Transcript

0:01

Hello, I'm Stephanie Arapian and this is The Centered Creator Podcast. I tell stories from my creative life, my travels, my many questionable decisions, and what I've learned about being human along the way. This one's about the moment I got the best news of my career and then immediately tried to talk myself out of it.

Stephanie 0:30

So this story is about... saying Yes. Saying yes when you have no idea how something's gonna happen. So I was in New Orleans. Woo-hoo. Shout out to New Orleans. Awesome city. Would love to go back. I was in New Orleans with my mom and my sister. We have this tradition of crashing my mom's medical conferences when she goes and then getting her to play hooky for the weekend. It's fun. It happens all over the country. So this time it was in New Orleans and it is our last day. It's Sunday evening. We're getting ready to go out to dinner on our last night. And as we're getting into the Uber to go to dinner, I get a notification on my phone that says, congratulations, your short film has been accepted in the Berlin Sci-Fi film Festival. Oh my God. Oh my God. And I'm in the car and I can literally tell my mom and my sister and they can celebrate with me. And it was not only just like a family, yay we're in New Orleans together. But now it's we're celebrating. You're taking really big steps for your career. Oh my God. This is your first international selection. You're going international. We're going global. Woo-hoo. One of my goals for this film was to do that. And then 24 hours later I'm sitting there like, I don't know if I can do this. How am I gonna afford it? What are the logistics can I call out of work? What am I doing? I haven't put any time off, like, ah!... It's amazing how quick that happened. I saw this amazing thing coming at me. I got this great news, and then I turned around and immediately started shutting it off, finding all the ways it couldn't work, finding all the reasons why it, it was difficult or it was gonna be trickier. And then deciding, do I really want to go? Is it really gonna be possible for me? And then trying to put limits on it or conditions on it. I would tell myself like, well, I can go, if I can manage to score three meetings before I go, or if I manage to get the time off then I'll go. I was putting conditions on it and I am in coaching and I brought this up in my coaching group and celebratory win. Woo-hoo. I'm all about celebrating the win of getting in and then I didn't celebrate the win of going and my coach directly called me out 'cause I love her for it. She told me straight out, she said, "Stephanie. You told me one of your goals was to take this internationally, and you said if you got into this festival, hands down, you would go." And I was like, yes, I did say that. I did say I would go. And then she further pushed me and said, "you asked the universe to give you this because one of your goals is to work internationally and explore international co-productions." I was like, yes, I did ask for that. Your point? And she said, metaphor, you asked the universe for this and it turned on the hose, and now the hose is firing off the water and giving you in gushes what you're looking for. Why are you trying to kink the hose? And when I thought about it, I didn't really have a good answer. Fear, security, all those wonderful things that are fears that hold you back, and create judgmental opinions and create scenarios that sound incredibly logical. Like my gremlin is really good at finding extremely logical reasons why I should not do things stay away from things that are very uncomfortable because they're unsafe and I need to be protected. And having her call it out was like, man, I was actually really disappointed in myself that I had let myself starting to get like, no, and you shouldn't. And there I am should-ing myself again. I took that in and I said, all right, you are, you are absolutely right. And by the next day I was looking at flights and then I booked my flight and I was like, I don't know how I'm gonna make it work. I'm going, because I said I would go, I want this. The universe is delivering. What happens? Okay, we'll just say I'm going. And it was the most amazing thing that happened after that. I was telling people, yeah, I got into an international film festival. I lived in Germany before for about three years, many years ago it was Hamburg, but it'll be like, you know, basically a new city for me, but, you know, not unfamiliar. But it would be really fun to go back as a filmmaker. So I, it was coming up in conversations. There's a lot of small talk that happens when you're a bartender. I was sharing it and I was getting a lot of encouragement. I shared with some of my really close friends, and my family and then I shared it with another friend and she was like, wait, do you know my friend And I was like, I think you've mentioned them, but I don't know them. And it turned out that my friend wanted to introduce me to a German filmmaker who also lives part-time in Los Angeles and is like a couple steps ahead and a couple years ahead of me, but is doing the exact same thing and she's like, you should talk to them. I'm like, okay. Great. So another new connection. And then I shared this with my representation and my agent told me oh, that sounds like a really great opportunity. I'm giving you the name of, a writer director that is actually one of my clients. I've told him that you're coming. Here's his email. I've already reached out and he's good. He's happy to help you when you're here just in case You've got an extra backup. Okay. Thank you. That was not what I was expecting, but I appreciate that. Thank you so much. There were so many things that were trickling into my awareness and being gifted to me because I said yes, I said yes, and I didn't know how I was gonna make it happen. And then the leave got approved. And everything was just lining up. And looking at it back now I'm like, yeah, that's what happens when you're doing something that's so in alignment with who you are. There is something about when there's a click about what you're doing, who you are, and where you're supposed to be and where you're going, and they're all kind of slowly coming together. This is coming. This is coming. This is coming. This is coming. Ah, now was the experience perfect? No, nothing's perfect. Did I have a most amazing fucking time on it? Hell yes. I had an amazing time. I got to go back to a country that I quite like. I love Germany. I got to meet some fascinating filmmakers and have some really good conversations. Side note. In the film festival experience in Germany, like people just randomly go to film festivals. I don't have to beg borrow steal and plead with their like dogs to, to come and see my film. They just wander in off the street. cause they thought it sounded cool and they just came and then we chat about it afterward. It was like the coolest thing ever. Wow, you mean I don't have to do a whole marketing campaign to get people It was not a huge festival, but it was a meaningful festival, and the connections that I made there were really meaningful, and in the end it led me to making several bigger leaps. If people ask me what my next step is, I should probably have an answer for that. Well, if I was gonna do that, I'll talk about how I'm developing this. Am I developing it in a feature or a TV pilot I'm like, well. Feature. So then I started thinking about the feature and okay, if I've got the feature, what am I gonna do with that? And then while I was in Germany, talking to people about, Berlinale and European Film Market. And I'm like, Hmm, that's a thought. And lo and behold, several months later, I am in Berlin again. Long story, we'll get to that in another episode. But what I'm getting at here is that once I said yes, it was unkinking the hose, allowing things to happen for me and being ready and open to whatever might come up for me, and then getting that ball rolling on the forward momentum of the process. So if that struck a chord with you, I'd love to hear about a yes that you took a leap that you took without really knowing and how it played out for you. Until next time, take care.